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Private Notes
This video is about the astronomical amount of astronomical evidence for black holes, ranging from x-ray binaries with accretion disks, supermassive infrared-radiating galactic nuclei black holes, orbital characteristics of high mass binaries, and direct gravitational wave detection of inspiraling merging black hole binaries with LIGO. Yes, they're real.
This is the first in a series of videos about special relativity. This is definitely not an academic course, but it's going to be a more in depth and developed exploration of a single topic than a typical standalone MinutePhysics video. I've been greatly inspired (and heckled) to do this by my friend Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown who's set the standard for this kind of thing with his excellent series - serieses? - on calculus and linear algebra.
So, special relativity. Special relativity is one of the most popularly famous ideas in physics – it's that thing that Einstein figured out about the speed of light and space and time and E=mc^2! It changed our understanding of the universe. And its core ideas are accessible in principle to anyone who understands some basic algebra and geometry - you don't even need to know calculus!
And yet in spite of this, special relativity is one of the subjects in physics that confuses the most people, and in many cases turns them away from physics altogether.
This video is chapter 2 in my series on special relativity, and it covers spacetime diagrams, rotational and translational symmetry of both time and space, how certain transformations preserve distances (measured in terms of a reference like a meter or second), and so on. We'll wait until the next video to talk about Lorentz transformations, relativity of velocity, minkowski diagrams, and the speed of light.
Thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project and the Space Telescope Science Institute for supporting this video.
This video is about the line between Brown dwarfs and gas giant planets (aka super Jupiter's): does it exist? Is it the deuterium-burning threshold? Behavior? Metallicity? Formation? Or is there no meaningful scientific distinction, and are brown dwarfs and giant planets really all on a spectrum with no clear line between them?
This video is chapter 3 in my series on special relativity, and it covers boosts, galilean transformations, newtonian relativity, and of course Lorentz transformations, the constancy of the speed of light, relative changes of velocity between inertial reference frames, etc - some of the stuff Einstein figured out. I introduce the mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is chapter 4 in my series on special relativity, and it covers how things that appear simultaneous from one perspective in our universe aren't simultaneous from other moving perspectives - that is, from inertial reference frames moving at different speeds. This is explained via the Lorentz transformation of coordinates of the events in question, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is chapter 5 in my series on special relativity, and it covers how things that are moving (that is, moving relative to an inertial reference frame) at different speeds appear to be shorter in length... and longer in length. And shorter in time, and longer in time. It all makes sense, I promise, and is clear when you use the Lorentz transformation of coordinates of the events in question, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is chapter 6 in my series on special relativity, and it covers the topic of relativistic addition of velocity: aka, how things that are moving relative to one inertial reference frame, which is moving relative to another reference frame, what speed or velocity are those things moving relative to the second frame. We'll show this using the Lorentz transformation of moving worldlines, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video is about the cycloid curves on Jupiter's moon Europa - they're ridges or valleys in the icy surface that formed due to some sort of geological or tectonic-esque phenomenon. The answer involves ping pong balls, the pacific ring of fire, subduction, tidal bulges, and tailcracking,
This video is chapter 7 in my series on special relativity, and it covers the idea that some things AREN'T relative: there IS a sense of absolute length and absolute time, which can be agreed upon from all moving perspectives (as long as they're inertial reference frames). In particular, proper length and proper time, aka the spacetime interval. Essentially, this is the spacetime version of the pythagorean theorem, and we'll explore it using the Lorentz transformations of lengths and time intervals, enacted with a mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe.
This video recounts a lecture by Richard Feynman giving an elementary demonstration of why planets orbit in ellipses. See the excellent book by Judith and David Goodstein, "Feynman's lost lecture”, for the full story behind this lecture, and a deeper dive into its content.
This video is about how the physics and chemistry of sugar (in particular, how it melts, and how it caramelizes) is more complicated than you might think. It involves fructose, sucrose, glucose, and a sticky mess.
This video is chapter 8 in my series on special relativity, and it presents a hands-on explanation of the resolution to the Twins Paradox using the mechanical minkowski diagram, aka mechanical Lorentz transformation, aka spacetime globe. Of course, the Twins paradox can be resolved with an understanding of spacetime intervals, relative inertial frames of reference, etc, but this is a nice hands-on version where you actually measure the proper times on a real, physical spacetime diagram with a ruler.
This video is about Tuned Mass Dampers, which can be used to reduce or avoid unwanted vibrations, swaying, swinging, bending, etc on engineered structures ranging from buildings, skyscrapers, electricity power transmission lines, airplane engines, formula one race cars, etc. TMD's use damped coupled oscillators.
This video is about the original cold fusion: μ muon-catalyzed cold fusion of deuterium, tritium, hydrogen, into helium-3 and helium 4. The problems with it are the half-life of muons and the sticking of muons to alpha particles. Also involved are neutrons, protons, break-even, etc. This has nothing to do with fusion by capture in palladium electrodes.
This video is about how terrestrial muons are part of our experimental proof of time dilation, length contraction, and special relativity in general.
This video is about Hardy's Paradox, wherein an electron and positron (or photons polarized horizontally and vertically) pass through Mach-Zehnder interferometers that overlap such that the particles have a chance of annihilating. If they do annihilate, then the interference pattern changes and there is a probability for both particles to be detected in the "dark arms" of the detector, that is, where previously there was no probability for detection for either particle. The paradox has implications for local realism, contextuality, lorentz elements of reality, and has been used as an experimental setup for weak measurements.
